White Wilderness

Dead Oceans;
2011

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John Vanderslice is a known and avowed tinkerer. He operates Tiny Telephone Studio, so if he wants to take his time making a record, he certainly can. All of his albums to date have been meticulously assembled things, full of carefully layered sounds, tweaked and prodded into shape over months. I guess everybody needs a change of pace now and then, because White Wilderness was recorded in three days with a live band, outside of Tiny Telephone. The live band in question is something called the Magik*Magik Orchestra, led by Minna Choi. They're not strictly a chamber orchestra in the sense you might expect. Yes, Choi has arranged these songs with strings and woodwinds, but the orchestra members also contribute things like piano, drums, and pedal steel.

So he got out of the studio and stretched his legs a little with a small orchestra. What kind of record does that make? Well, take away the tinkering and you get a record that still fits quite comfortably into Vanderslice's discography-- it's not that different, stylistically, from anything else he's done. The meticulous studio layering missing here is largely covered up by the orchestration. If there's any significant difference, it's in Vanderslice himself. His voice sounds much more vulnerable and fragile in this setting. I think back in particular to 2009's Romanian Names, where he seemed to be growing more comfortable with building himself into a small choir and was really putting his vocals out front; here, he recedes into the band a bit more, occasionally bolstered by a harmony from Choi or a few fluttering "ah ahs" from some of the orchestra.

He gets some of those "ahs" on "The Piano Lesson", a song literally about learning to play piano that Choi uses as an orchestral playground. Vanderslice's wandering vocal melody is anchored by an ominous sax figure, the strings play racing pizzicato patterns, brass and flutes swell queasily, and the overall effect is strikingly dark. There's a subtle tension at play on the album, almost a tug of war between Vanderslice and Choi, and one or the other typically winds up dominating each song, but there are a few where they strike a real balance. Up-tempo standout "Overcoat" is one of those songs. Vanderslice isn't so much a verse/chorus songwriter, but he can craft a memorable melody, and this one is great. It keeps the moaning woodwinds and shivering strings at bay until the second half of the song, when the complexity of the arrangement increases, leaving him to carefully pick his way through shards of orchestration.

One thing that working with an orchestra didn't disrupt is Vanderslice's commitment to concision. It must have been tempting to make something sprawling and try to live up to the orchestral scope of the project, but White Wilderness is just over a half hour long, like most of Vanderslice's albums. This has always served him well-- none of his records wear out their welcome. Neither does this one, but I do get the feeling there's a reason he usually spends so much time agonizing over his records-- all that tweaking really brings out the details of his songwriting, which are sometimes lost in the orchestration and less polished vocals here. Still, these types of projects can help a songwriter refocus and between them Vanderslice and Choi have made a memorable album that successfully adds a new twist to Vanderslice's catalog.